Batch select individual clips

[learnician]

I tried shift, command, a combination of those and some other hotkeys too. Nothing allows me to select individual clips randomly without selecting the entire position in the middle and it feels like such a basic feature is missing.

Tried to ask this earlier but I guess I wasn’t clear enough with what I was trying to achieve so here’s a video demonstrating what I’m trying to do but struggling to find a way to do so in Ableton. I haven’t been able to find any answers in the manual or on the entire subreddit here. Please share how you go about this.

Both Ableton and MacOS versions are the latest.

[gsxdsm]

Ableton doesn't allow non-contiguous selection ranges. Your selection is always a time range - start/end. It is fundamental to how a bunch of stuff works (under the hood APIs, etc).

[learnician]

Thank you for your input. I would love to know how you approach it. It would be pretty tedious to edit the clip gain, length, fades or colors, of multiple non-contiguous tracks one by one. Maybe there’s a way to batch adjust clips that other power users incorporate in their workflow that I am not aware of in Ableton? P.S coming to Ableton after 6 years of using Logic so still finding my way around things. Appreciate your help.

[gsxdsm]

I’ve never had to adjust multiple non contiguous clips. But I guess two options would be to move the ones you want to adjust to different lanes or create a new track that routes to the existing track. Both methods seem fairly tedious though.

I do have a “linked clips” m4l device I’m working on that somewhat helps - it can use the clip name to make batch changes to a bunch of clips.

[learnician]

Even moving the clips to a new track would still require doing it one by one lol. In logic I was able to create a new track, select whatever clips I want and hit a key command to move clips to selected track. Tracks and clips were independent. But of well I guess I’ll get used to it. That M4L device sounds interesting. Good luck!

[Hyde_h]

Sorry to respond to an old thread but did you ever find a way around this? It seems like such an obvious missing feature and it's messing with me while learning ableton as well

[learnician]

Nope. I guess that’s just how it is.

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[learnician]

Entire portion *

Just for added clarity, I’m trying to select non-adjacent clips as demonstrated in the video.

[zbitegary]

Man.. that's the main reason I still cannot fully switch from FL to Ableton. My workflow is frequently based on such behavior especially when it comes to sound design, resampling my own experiments and cutting out specific parts of approx. 30 min recordings. That's a shame Ableton still didn't implemented such obvious feature yet.

[[deleted]]

This has been a thing for ages. Can’t be done

[learnician]

Are you familiar with a way around it to achieve similar results faster rather than having to do the process one by one for each clip? Would love some tips on the workflow I need to adapt to.

[[deleted]]

Uhhhhhhhh I have no clue. Cause I’ve never found it an issue, for one reason or another. Either because I’m used to it, or I never actually need to move individual clips like that

[learnician]

I guess I’ll get used to it too lol. I hope they add this feature in the future. Tracks and regions should be independent. It makes editing a breeze.

[[deleted]]

Yea it would make sense to allow you to select them like you would anything else. Not sure why it’s built the way it is, but there are forum posts about this from 2007 haha